Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Oakley Hall 1920-2008

Oakley Hall's "Warlock" (1958) is a great Western novel and a great novel period. It reimagines Tombstone as the town of Warlock and gives new names and details to the participants in the famous shootout at the OK Corral. It does a brilliant job of combining all the stock figures of the American West with something approaching the real history of that epoch in all its gun fighting, gambling, whoring, rustling, strike breaking, Indian killing, land stealing "glory". I'm sure (but don't have the surveillance video) that David Milch mined this book massively for "Deadwood". Ave Oakley Hall. He had a great life and wrote a masterpiece.